I hate cats. Therefore, I like Dead Cat. He’s the star of the Bedlam Press anthology DEAD CAT’S TRAVELING CIRCUS OF WONDERS AND MIRACLE MEDICINE SHOW, one of the strangest books you will read. As in, ever.

The creation of editor Gerard Houarner and the artist known only as GAK, Dead Cat is a mangy feline with matted hair, a split skull, a thrice-pierced ear, many bandages and one eye. Sixteen different writers – including Tim Lebbon, Jeffrey Thomas, P.D. Cacek and Brian Hodge – take pleasure in putting Dead Cat through the ringer in their stories, poems and stream-of-consciousness ramblings for your horror and satisfaction.

In these short pieces, Dead Cat fancies himself Puss in Boots of fairy-tale fame and meets a giant ogre, encounters Cthulhu in a beatnik jazz club, skirts around Chinatown, helps dismember a particularly obese corpse at a crematorium, finds a dead baby cat at the dump, and meets all sorts of crazy characters, including “porn-bots” in space, bluesman John Lee Hooker, zombified versions of Ren & Stimpy and other assorted demons.

Dead Cat’s adventures are über-strange, such as Gary A. Braunbeck’s number, in which the rotting pet bears witness to a sexually deviant guy slather peanut butter over his naked body, to which he sticks various strays. But Garrett Peck’s “Dead Cat Food” is the book’s real highlight, with Dead Cat turned into an unwitting spokesperson for cans of Cat Cuisine.

It’s the best of all because it tells an actual story, start to finish, whereas others are content with being mere sketches. And some verge on being impenetrable, written in fragmented, elementary sentences like the ones Dead Cat occasionally spouts. They’re often missing words, so you wonder if perhaps you aren’t missing something, like you walked in a room halfway through a joke and caught little more than the punchline.

“What is Houarner talking about here? Can anybody understand what Houarner talking about?” asks Dead Cat himself on one of the bridging narration pages. The answer is “half the time, no.”

But even when the CIRCUS won’t engage your brain, it will engage your eyes with GAK’s truly twisted, original, way-out drawings. Not only do they give, er, life to the character of Dead Cat, but they set a definite tone that makes good on the anthology’s lumbering title. Exhibiting a warped, manic energy, they don’t just illustrate the stories – they make them better. They’re the real star of this most bizarre show, not for everyone’s tastes. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon or Shocklines.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• BERSERK by Tim Lebbon
• DEADSTOCK by Jeffrey Thomas
• THE EVERLASTING by Tim Lebbon
• KEEPERS by Gary A. Braunbeck
• A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS by Jeffrey Thomas
• PUNKTOWN by Jeffrey Thomas